Today, at Microsoft's BUILD conference in Anaheim, California, Microsoft unveiled the biggest overhaul of Windows since Windows 95. The venue was not coincidental; in the same city, in 1993, during the first Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft unveiled Windows 95 for the first time. Steven Sinofsky, supported by an army of Microsoft executives, demonstrated a whole boatload of things for Windows 8, and make no mistake, they had a lot to show. Two important notes: the Windows 8 Developer Preview will be free to download later today (no activation, will be updated regularly, and includes the new interface), and Win32 is the past.

It's geared to developers but it has really good information about things like the tiles, search, sharing between apps, etc...

I only watched about 1/3 of it, but not a fan of what I'm seeing so far... as in, "Hey, let's remove all the controls and idiot-proof the interface." Take a look at the RSS example around the 5 minute mark; in the 'chrome' example they show, there's far more information on the screen at once, which I very much prefer.

And it seems like MS can't make up their mind. On one hand, they're like, "Let's create this new Metro interface and remove all the buttons and controls", and then they go and add the ribbon to Windows Explorer. Isn't the ribbon sort of a direct contradiction to the simplistic and minimalistic design of Metro?

Applications that are more complex in function than an RSS reader require a more complex interface...the Ribbon provides access to the more complex features of an application with out cluttering up the UI.